Midnight at the Electric

About Midnight at the Electric

In 2065, Adri has been selected to join the first human mission to Mars. In the weeks before her departure, she discovers the diary of a girl named Catherine who lived in her Kansas house during the Dust Bowl of 1934. In 1889, in a rural English village, a girl named Lenore is writing letters that were never sent. Three girls across three centuries, connected by a house, by choices made under pressure, and by the question of what it costs to leave and what it costs to stay.

Published by HarperCollins in 2017, Midnight at the Electric is Jodi Lynn Anderson's most structurally ambitious work—a dual timeline expanded to three, with each era presented in a different narrative mode. Adri's sections are third-person contemporary science fiction; Catherine's are intimate 1930s journal entries; Lenore's are the letters themselves, incomplete and one-sided. The structure requires the reader to assemble the connections across the eras, and the payoff of that assembly is earned rather than forced.

The Dust Bowl sections—Catherine writing from the middle of one of the greatest ecological and human disasters in American history—are the novel's most grounded. The Kansas dirt, the failed crops, the families who stayed and the families who left, the specific texture of a community's collapse: Anderson renders it with the care of a writer who has done her historical homework.

Survival, Departure, and the Lives That Preceded You

The novel's animating question is about the relationship between past and present selves—how the choices of people who lived before you, in spaces you now inhabit, continue to shape what is possible for you. Adri's Mars mission is not the novel's emotional center; it is the occasion for her to discover that she is not alone in the universe she carries with her, which is.

Anderson writes female friendship and connection—across time, in this case—with the same specificity she brought to Peaches. The bonds between the girls in Midnight at the Electric exist across impossible distances and ask what love is if not the desire to know someone completely even when that is impossible.

Why Midnight at the Electric Has Been Challenged

Midnight at the Electric has been challenged in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog. Challenges most often cite mature themes—loss, survival under impossible conditions, and a character's experience of illness—as well as some content related to sexuality. A novel that takes its young readers seriously enough to situate them in the sweep of historical catastrophe and personal loss is doing what the best young adult fiction does.